VLVL imbricate

[pynchonoid]

(I tried to post this earlier today but it doesn't
seem to have gone through.  Sorry if this is a
duplicate.)

T:
>Zoyd's or Trent's Camper has a
>stovepipe and a cedar roof. A familiar cartoon
>hillbilly ride. What P
>describes is a mansarded roof and I wonder why he
>didn't use the term
>being as he went through the trouble to learn a bit
>about roofing and
>carpentry to write this book. And cars too.

You may have read the book, T, but it sounds as if you
haven't been to Northern California, and I'm beginning
to suspect you don't know much about carpentry except
some buzz words, too.  The kind of hand-made camper
unit that fits on a pickup truck, as described by
Pynchon, is common from the SF Bay Area on north -- I
saw, and rode in many during the months I spent in
Humboldt County back in '79-80  ("Phantom Ridge Road"
recalls, for me at least, "Salmon Ridge Road" where I
lived that fall and winter, and the nearby area called
"Whale Gulch" is/was just the sort of
marijuana-growing hippie community Pynchon describes).

Some of these campers start out as commercial shells,
then are modified or decorated. Some of them are built
from scratch (a neighbor of mine has one of those). 
Some of hand-made campers are quite beautiful in their
own way, as are many of the hand-made houses that
people like Zoyd have fashioned over the years, by
adding on to old mobile homes, etc.  Call it a
"hillbilly ride" if you need to, but why so insulting
-- to the entire '60s subculture in general, and to
Pynchon in particular?  Believe it or not, some of
those old hippies have created quite a few things of
beauty -- not just in wood, but also music, and, no
surprise here, literature, including  Vineland,
Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, etc. But you've got
your points to score, I suppose.

Great call on the similarity to the haircut Eddie
Pensiero gives in the Byron the Bulb section of GR,
Mark, thanks.

Speaking of novels by old hippies, I recently re-read
_One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest_ by Ken Kesey, and
recommend it to you all.  I'd be very surprised to
learn that Pynchon hadn't read it -- Kesey's vision of
the "Combine" reverberates in GR, although Kesey's
novel, written at the beginning of the '60s when
liberation seemed possible, lacks the rage that shows
through GR and Vineland which were published at a time
when the Nixon (later, Reagan) reaction was well
underway and showing every sign of success. Kesey's
sentimentality shows, but some of the passages in that
novel are as powerful and as beautiful as any I've
read.

And, speaking of jbor's clumsy "deconstruction" (I use
the term cautiously to distinguish it from the work
that serious literary critics do) of Hector, I think
some of our younger participants may not realize that,
during the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, many
so-called "rogue" operations were undertaken by US
government employees, operations which in fact were
the expression of government policy, only organized
and executed in ways that insured "plausible
deniability" for the President, FBI, etc. Oliver North
Bush I, and the Iran-Contra scandal come to mind --
Nixon, Reagan and Bush could, and have, claimed to
know nothing about such operations, but funny how they
serve those Presidents' domestic and foreign policies.
 I recommend you brush up on your Watergate and
Iran-Contra history if you want to understand
Pynchon's critique of the US government in Vineland.
For a current exhibition of "plausible deniability"
watch what Bush II says while his spooks put others
plans into motion, in Iraq and wherever the next war
profiteering opportunity emerges.

-Doug

P.S. T's mistaken on the mansard roof assertion, too. 
The hand-made campers in this part of the world
(Northern California) feature a gable, gambrel or hip
roof. 

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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